REFUGE IN COMMUNITY

And then thunder
the echo
bombs kill babies
what do trees know?
Wind carries screams
vacant streets
nightmares for dreams.
Children?
We have none so far.
Childhood flees a wartime mother’s home,
here
in her arms
where all conflict begins and ends.
And you?
You wept flat on your back
under a storm cloud
Free,
trees washing you clean
while oblivion whistled

Note: The Verge was written summer 2013 with thoughts on conflict in Syria and U.S. intervention. A person can experience rapture while others are being slaughtered because it is possible to clear the mind of all thought under any circumstance. However, one who experiences embodied rapture also has a body capable of rupturing, a body that naturally feels a rupture when other bodies are being slaughtered because all bodies are so connected. So long as the battle rages and children are slaughtered in war, I am rapture in a ruptured body.

“We’ll also need to accept some good news,
which is that the pace of change is not even.
Predictions of doom usually assume a steady pace,
but in fact there is often acceleration
when masses go into motion.”
~George Lakey, Beyond Paris and the temptation to despair at Waging NonViolence

Ecology teaches that all of us ~ animals, plants, fungi, and the rest ~ are part of one
community, a global community. This Community is something humans know indigenously and
some humans forgot along the way, so the science of ecology has blossomed to teach,
remind. And of the three refuges, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, the third, Sangha, remains
the most practical and critical.

Knowing there is nothing to grasp or oppose,
I take refuge in sangha; in community.

Right now, myriad members of the global community continue to be made homeless every day
in what Will Falk calls the oldest refugee crisis, noting that to make refugees of plants
and other animals is to create human refugees. To remove every plant from the field except
those I wish to eat is not only cruel, it’s my suicide. As to clear the forest and
plant oil palm trees is not only genocide, it’s the cutter’s suicide.

And the cutter cuts and the taker takes because this is what he thinks he must do to
survive. Letting go of what I perceive to be security is quite difficult unless I've
experienced true security. Unless I know community. When I know community and someone
comes knocking, I am inclined to let him in. If he does not know community, he is inclined
to take advantage of me in the most grotesque way. This misfortune has shattered the trust
of nearly all indigenous minds. This is the mistrust being rectified, healed at Wounded
Knee and other soils still bleeding of war. So, as always, the primary task is to create
community by showing one another what community looks like when it is understood that the
community includes everyone and everyone is at a loss when a single one is left out.

There is conflicted opinion on what has come out of the Paris Climate talks, the sum of
which seems to be, something was accomplished, let the work begin. Included in the
relevant links section below are several essays reflecting on COP21. Of these, please at
least read George Lakey's on avoiding the temptation to despair. George reflects on his
recovery and healing from despair, symptomatically manifest in lymphoma, at age 39, 39
years ago. George shares how the primary lessons of that experience apply globally today
following what to many appears to be the "death sentence" coming out of the Paris
talks.

George writes of a year that he devoted solely to digging in and changing behavioral patterns arising from and giving rise to his thought patterns. He notes that he pulled through with the help of friends old and new; members of his immediate community.

So, let there be a death sentence coming out of Paris and let there be a universal decision among us (the 100%) "to go for it....to accept the good news...that the pace of change is not even."

Let 2016 be the year of rapid response.

Breathe in the diagnosis. Explore how planetary death feels. Then look into what is
possible and what is already happening on the mend. There is much in place just waiting to
be scaled up, such as genius design at Biomimicry 3.8 and precycling actions to cut waste
risk throughout the community. On the circular economy, James Greyson at Blind Spot Think
Tank writes, “This [precycling premiums] would be a way to act across ecological,
resource, waste, and climate issues with the power of (corrected) markets” making
obsolete the force that government represents.

I too received a cancer diagnosis. Mine was melanoma at age 19. I too had someone, an
Internal Medicine doc, reflect for me that the melanoma was symptom of a deep discord
within. I too landed in the arms of community, which included milk thistle growing
throughout the mountain garden of the Sequatchie Valley (Tennessee). And the physical
cleansing I found in that community was, for me, clearly also spiritual when one day a
thought came while tending the soil: This world is full of the sorrow you keep. Enough
now, please smile. After intensive grief ritual a decade later, that smile,
a simple joy
like contentment, was restored to my being.

While collectively the externalized internal discord looks like releasing heavy metals from the ground and polluting the waters, clear-cutting forest, and on, it's noting and mending the internal discord that ultimately changes the outward action, because the outward action changes as the inner work is being done.

To mend, we must show others that we are trustworthy and place our trust in others. Just as beaver knows how to build a fine dam, human beings know how to build shelter that reflects kindness toward everyone in the community. The revolutionary medicine is appreciating ourselves and one another. This original creative cure works miracles. Regardless of what governments have penned, the power to change course remains in the actions of individuals who choose to go for it, to live well in light of death. According to Cherri Foytlin, the revolutionary medicine thrives in the jungle of Calais, where art is everywhere among humans grateful to be alive and able to help one another.

Let Cherri’s offering from her visit to Calais remind of the friendship so desperately wanting in every homeland soil. Human poverty in the wealthiest nations fuels global abject poverty and homelessness, provoking the oldest refugee crisis to its peak. Human hands are capable of crafting exquisite furnishings, carefully and genuinely produced, each one with a unique twist, none being replicated precisely. Who really wants a thing whose story is unknown at best and awful at worst? No one wants to buy cheaply made products produced with slave labor and everyone buys what they can afford. Change consumption and giving patterns. If you can, relieve one U.S. single parent and one working family of financial stress in 2016 and you will have helped countless international refugees of all walks.

Let suppressed power be remembered, true power being the eagerness to live not toward any
goal but friendship, to carry on in rapture simply because we are so in love with one
another and everyone - the winged, the legged, the crawlers, the stationary - who cheer,
“Go for it. Please do! We are here. We are here”. And let it be understood
that carrying out mass suicide is no ultimate death, only the rebirth of another round in
suffering that will play itself out again, and again, until trust restored breaks the
chain of unnecessary violence.

With a child who celebrates his sixth birthday this month in my care, I find the only failure on my part would be to throw in the rag. What else is there to do but give living well all I’ve got while we are here together? When I die, let my forehead be flat to the ground offering gladness, gratitude, and peace.